


Liar

by KuraiTsuky



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:15:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28323705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KuraiTsuky/pseuds/KuraiTsuky
Summary: Pavetta finds out Duny’s secret.But she’s the daughter of the Lioness, she refuses to die with a whimper.
Relationships: Calanthe Fiona Riannon/Eist Tuirseach, Past Emhyr van Emreis/Pavetta
Comments: 13
Kudos: 38





	Liar

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Song of the same name by Lovebites.

She’s not a great warrior, like her mother, but she refuses to let him win. She refuses to die and allow him to get away with it. Even when her arms burn and her legs feel like they might fall off, she swims. Even as the waves move her around like a cork, and every now and then submerge her, even if the only thing she can taste is salt water and she feels like she’s breathing in the sea more than she’s taking in air, Pavetta refuses to die. She thinks of Ciri whom she can’t bear to leave alone, of her mother, who after all was right about _him._

But more than anything, she remembers the small smirk on his face as he pushed her off the ship and swims. Coughing and crying but she swims.

  
  


Pavetta must have lost consciousness at some point, because she wakes up to the sun in her face. She coughs and snaps to a sitting position before nausea takes the better of her and she has to lean on the sand once more. In that brief moment she realizes though, that she is still almost completely submerged in the shallow water of the beach. Her dress is all torn and she has welts on her every part of her skin she can see.

But she’s alive.

At that, Pavetta wants to laugh. Whether in victory or because she has finally lost her mind, she’s not sure. She vomits, bile spewing all over the sand before being collected by the sea. For some time, she’s not sure how much, Pavetta just lies there, makes herself into a ball and tries to ignore the nausea, the thirst and the general stench of algae and Goddess knows what else that surrounds her, or maybe it’s just what she smells like. After a while though, the need to drink something, even just a few drops, makes her get up. Or try anyway, she mostly just crawls to a semi standing position, then promptly stumbles back to her knees.

She cries the few drops of water she has left in her body until she doesn’t feel anything, her mattered hair, falling limp over her face, as she heaves and trembles, fat tears running down her nose until there’s none left. Until she doesn’t feel anything anymore.

Pavetta gets up then, like a ghost she walks on the sand, barely leaving an imprint, she will later reflect on how much of a representation of her life this seems to be, when her mind is hers again. As things are, as the tears dry on her face, chapped lips opened with thirst and a cruel, vague hope that refuses to abandon her, Pavetta almost glides over the harsh grains that burn the soles of her bare feet as she makes her way north, or what she thinks, might be north.

At some point, when she comes back to herself in the middle of a freshly ploughed field, the princess sees a small current and bends, to frantically feast on the fresh water that runs throughout. It isn’t until she’s truly satiated that she realizes she craves more, she desires something she’s never desired before. She wants revenge.

Pavetta crushes the soft soil in between her fingers and remembers how, as she fought for her life against the waves that saw fit to spare it, as the pain of the betrayal threatened to leave her paralysed she had only wished for one thing as she swam. To survive, true, but beyond that, she’d wanted to extract her revenge, to make Duny, or Emrys, whatever his true name is, pay. For breaking her heart, for taking her love and twisting it into a weapon that would see her family, her kingdom, break. For taking her love and crushing her with it. As Pavetta raises her head above the water, thirst forgotten and new strength breathed into her tired bones, she can only want for two things, her daughter in her arms and Duny’s head upon a spike.

She is not a Dragon like her grandfather or a Lioness like her mother but even a Rose has her thorns.*

She sits there, unknowingly rubbing soil into her face as she furiously wipes her eyes, and can’t help but feel like a dumb child.

She’d been too in love, too charmed by the knight that came suddenly into her life and liked all the things she loved, the man that understood her, that didn’t want her for her future crown. Except that had been a big, fat lie, hadn’t it? He’d never truly loved her, he’d wanted her blood in his child and that’d been it. And yet, she’d fallen for it. Like a moron, she’d bought his lies and swallowed them whole. Pavetta had been willing to give her body and soul to the man that almost, almost, broke them in half. And she had, her purity, her heart, nothing had been enough to see that thieving, backstabbing liar smile.

When the news hit Cintra, Calanthe looks like she’s taking it all in stride, or at least that is how she hopes she looks. The Lioness cannot cry in public because a Lioness does _not_ break. In private though… in private she rages, and screams, and trashes her bedroom until she’s laying amongst the rubble and splintered wood. In Private she does break. Avoiding even Eist who, in spire of having grown to love Pavetta like a daughter since their wedding, is at a loss, often standing in the background unable to do anything as she collapses from grief. Nothing he can say or do can fill this hole that has opened in Calanthe’s heart.

Then the mania begins, the searches, something happens in her mind, something that seems, in everyone else’s eyes, to shatter the mind of the Queen. But Eist doesn’t have the heart to tell her to stop, because on those moments when the parties ready to go he can see a glimpse, in the way her eyes recover some of the shine they used to have, of the woman he fell in love with. So he doesn’t ask her to stop, and nobody else has the balls.

The only one that is able to cut through Calanthe’s grief is Ciri. But even her can’t stop the Lioness from sending parties to search for her cub. It’s been almost a week since the news when he decides to join his wife, who is directing the search herself this time around, in what he’s sure will be another futile search, this one going further away from the coast than the others, the words he doesn’t want to say burning in his throat, he is never been afraid of speaking to Calanthe, even when she barely tolerated him, but he’s never wanted to make her hurt and now, he’ll be tearing at her wound. But then, as they leave the Palace, Calanthe looks at him with the truth shining in her eyes and says to him the first words she’s said since this whole nightmare happened.

“She lives, Eist, I know it.” And he believes her. The Lioness speaks the truth, and it’s not a matter of faith.

He nods at her, chastising himself for ever questioning her, even on the depths of his mind “I believe you,” and straightening in his mount he adds, to her visible relief “and I will follow you.”

Calanthe is not sure what impulses to start searching, she knows how her drive will be seen, but there is absolute the surety in her heart that her daughter is still alive. And she doesn’t mean that the princess lives now in his daughter, but that she is actually still living. If she’d been more maternally inclined, Calanthe would have attributed it to maternal instinct, as things are, it might as well be magic, though that doesn’t diminish the knowledge she holds to be true.

She doesn’t speak to Eist before, not because it is painful, though it is, but because she doesn’t fully know how to explain. Instead hoping he will trust her. Later, when she can put at the very least, her belief into words, she feels bad for having doubted him. Calanthe begins to doubt herself however, when the night begins to fall and there is still, yet again, no sign of Pavetta.

Then, as they begin to give up, thinking of making camp for the night the sound of a scuffle distract them. They come from the boundary with a nearby forest close to the mountains as they have ridden their horses at breakneck speed. There, in the mud, struggling against a man twice her size, covered in dirt and black and blue, is Pavetta.

  
  


She walks for what feels like an eternity, stopping when its dark and curling onto herself next to bushes or tree roots and avoiding other people like the plague. It might be more than just shyness, she might be not savvy in the ways of the world, but she’s not as pampered as people usually assume. And even if there’s no mirror, Pavetta knows how helpless she must look. How she must look like easy pickings. So she eats the low hanging fruit, and drinks from small currents, and attempts to ignore the cold at night, thanking all the Gods she knows it’s summer. Her feet hurt, and so does everything above. But it’s nothing compared to the pain in her heart.

It all comes to a head six days, she’s counted, after she woke up. Before she can hide in the bushes that line the path, a man spots her and she can see in the way his mouth twists into a dirty smile, what’s in his mind. Pavetta is not strong enough to run, but when he tackles her to the ground, she fights back like a hellion, scratching and biting and screaming herself hoarse.

  
  


That is how her mother finds her.

Biting down on her attacker’s arm. Quite the impression to make, she thinks suppressing a snort.

The man tries to scamper as soon as he sees the royal party, but Pavetta is too busy looking at her mother to care what he does. Calanthe looks like she’s aged years in a few days, but her expression becomes impossibly brighter as soon as she recognized the bruised mess that is her only child, and it makes Pavetta want to weep again. Her mother and her haven’t been close in years, too different from one another everyone said, but she herself, has always felt like a disappointment in the face of the great lioness. That feeling of worthlessness had eventually turned to despair and a resentment that even now, as an adult, she’s ashamed to admit to. But whatever feelings she felt before towards the woman standing in front of her, disappear when gauntleted hands brush away the worst of the dirt that coats her face and armour clad arms embrace her tightly. Her mother is weeping in her shoulder and now, if there is something Pavetta hates, is that she reduced the greatest monarch in Cintran history to this. However, she doesn’t have much time to reflect, as the knot she’s felt on her stomach since washing up on that beach, unravels.

Pavetta’s not sure how she’s managed to hold it all together up until this point but now, she just crumples in her mother's arms and cries. In between tears and hiccups, she explains exactly what happened as she cuddles in her mother’s arms like she hasn’t done since she was a child.

Calanthe doesn’t speak the “I told you so” that’s on the tip of her tongue, instead, she just holds Pavetta as she weeps and swears to rain vengeance on the man that broke her daughter’s heart.

  
  


As she sees the walls of Cintra, bundled on her mother’s cape, Pavetta thinks of how soon she will see her daughter again now that she’s back home. And once she finally has Ciri in her arms again there will only be one other thing she truly desires in this world. The thing she dreamed of on that beach that now seems so far away, to see Duny’s head propped upon those battlements.

**Author's Note:**

> *Calling Pavetta a Rose comes from the magnificent fic “Veiled Truths” by TheMarvelousMadMadamMim, go read it if you haven’t before. (She tells me she got it from the song “The Last Rose of Cintra” but hers is the first fic I read it in)


End file.
